Review of Nuclear Plant Security Is Faulted

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: September 15, 2004

Nuclear power plants will soon be required to defend against bigger, more capable groups of attackers, but Congressional auditors said Tuesday that it would be years before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would know if the plants meet the requirements.

The commission has been ordering changes since the Sept. 11 attacks, and in April 2003 it published requirements, which take effect next month, for how many attackers a plant must be prepared to repel, and what training, weapons and tactics it should employ. The commission required plant owners to submit plans on how they would comply.

But the commission's assessment of the plans ''has been rushed and is largely a paper review,'' Jim Wells, an auditor at the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional agency formerly known as the General Accounting Office, said at a House subcommittee hearing. The owners' submissions consisted mostly of checking ''yes'' and ''no'' boxes on a form initially developed by the industry, Mr. Wells said.

The plans do not detail ''defensive positions at the site, how the defenders would deploy to respond to an attack or how long the deployments would take,'' he said.

The agency has visited only four or five of the plants to look at security arrangements, Mr. Wells testified before the subcommittee on national security of the House Government Reform Committee.

Representative Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee, asked, ''There isn't any real-life stuff to verify this is happening?''

Mr. Shays said people near reactors ''take little comfort from a cozy, indulgent regulatory process that looks and acts very much like business as usual.''

But a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official testified that the new requirements were mostly based on changes made in February 2002 in response to the terrorist attacks.

''It didn't take us three years to put out a new design basis threat,'' said the official, Roy P. Zimmerman, director of the commission's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response. He was referring to the description of possible attackers.

Mr. Zimmerman said about 80 percent of the new requirements were dictated to the industry in 2002. Thus, he added, the commission had time to observe the physical changes, even if the paperwork reviewed by the Government Accountability Office did not reflect that.

The question of how well the nation's 104 commercial nuclear power plants are prepared to repel terrorists has become murkier in the last few months, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission removed almost all data on the subject from its Web site. It had shut down the site after Sept. 11 and later restored much of the information on security, but has removed that data again. This has left the Government Accountability Office, which has a security clearance, as one of the few authoritative critics of the security arrangements.

In recent months, critics have pointed to the commission's decision to hire Wackenhut, a security company owned by Group 4 Falck, to train the workers who will conduct mock attacks on plants in triennial drills.

The commission said it was seeking to improve the quality of the ''attackers'' and make the drills more uniform around the country, but critics say Wackenhut also provides the guards at half the plants, creating a conflict of interest.

Mr. Wells, the auditor, noted this on Tuesday, saying that Wackenhut's relationship with the industry ''raises questions about the force's independence.'' At a drill at an Energy Department nuclear weapons plant in June 2003, Wackenhut ''attackers'' may have tipped off Wackenhut defenders just before the drill, he said.

Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio and a subcommittee member, said, ''To anyone with a shred of common sense, it was a poor choice.''

But Luis A. Reyes, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's executive director for operations, said that while Wackenhut would train the attackers, it was the commission that would grade the drills.